Twitter Project

For our twitter project we followed teachers as well as other groups related to education. We tried to tweet directly to teachers for advice, but we never received any responses back. However, we did learn a lot from just following what the teachers/groups tweeted about. We learned from one tweet that the biggest obstacle in the classroom isn’t always your students or what happens to them outside of the classroom, it is your mood as a teacher and how you choose to interact with your students. It also provided a list of things that you, as a teacher, have control over everyday such as: facial expression, tone of voice, the words you use, etc. Also, some teachers use twitter to post things that worked well for them in their classroom, experiences they had in hopes that followers will provide feedback, any questions they have regarding lesson ideas or general help they may need. Furthermore, following groups such as the US Department of Education, Scholastic Teachers, and PBS Teachers provided us with information regarding issues, changes, updates, etc. on things that are going on in the world of education. Even though we did not get direct feedback from teachers, we still learned a lot by following them and reading their posts. We feel that using twitter to become connected with other teachers will be extremely beneficial to us in the future as students/professional teachers.   

Using blogs in my own learning and teaching

            Blogs can be an effective tool in both learning and teaching. For my own learning, I plan to use blogs as a tool to get connected with other teachers. My hope is that I can get advice about starting out as a new teacher, and what to expect my first year. Also, I hope to use bogs as a way to learn new and fun ideas for different activities and lessons that I can incorporate into my classroom.

            As for teaching, I plan to use blogs differently depending on the grade that I will be teaching. If I am teaching in the lower elementary grades, I will use blogs as a way to keep parents and other readers informed and up to date about what we are learning and accomplishing in class, and as a way to document special events that go on. I plan on incorporating pictures, videos, and maybe even audio of my students completing fun activities and projects, as well as posting any information that parents may need to know about such as field trip information, classroom guidelines, etc.

            However, if I am teaching in the upper elementary grades, I will use blogs much differently. I will use the blogs as a way to get all of my students to get involved, as some students may not feel as comfortable sharing their thoughts/opinions in class. In the beginning, I will use blogs for various assignments. I will create a blog where the students respond about ideas or content that we talked about in class; I might create a blog after a field trip and have the students post about their favorite part of the trip, what they learned from it, or things they did not like; and I will create a blog to showcase the writing abilities of my students. The students could post short stories, poetry, etc. Not only will the students be posting comments, but I will also have them respond to other posts. This will help the students learn how to respond when there is an audience present, and it will also teach them how to give meaningful comments/feedback instead of just “I agree” or “I like your post.” Once the students feel comfortable with blogging, I want to use the blogs as a way for my students to connect with and learn about other students from around the country and hopefully even the world.  The students on both ends could learn a lot about each other from just the blogs, but we could also create mini geography lessons out of it by plotting the locations of the people we are talking to on the map and then discussing about that region/area. There are so many ways to utilize blogs in the classroom, but these are my initial ideas so far. 

Uses of blogs in teaching/learning

            In my technology class, we are learning about how to effectively incorporate technology into the classroom. The first type of technology we looked at/talked about were blogs. After researching, I found two classroom blogs that I felt were very effective. They are: Mrs. Cassidy's Classroom Blog (http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337) and Learning Is Messy – Blog (http://learningismessy.com/blog/)

            Both of these blogs are similar, but at the same time they are very different, which is why I like both of them. Mrs. Cassidy’s Classroom blog is geared around her first grade class. She uses the blog as a way to share what her students have been accomplishing in class, fun activities they may have done, etc. I also like the fact that she includes pictures, videos, and audio clips of her students so you can see them in action.  I feel this blog is a good way for parents and other readers to stay up to date on what the students are learning, as well as a place for teachers to get new ideas. I know I have gotten some good ideas from reading the blog.

            On the other hand, I also like the Learning is Messy blog because the teacher talked about how she incorporated blogs and other types of technology into her curriculum. She worked with the same students from fourth to sixth grade, and throughout that time, they used many types of technology to complete projects and assignments. In fourth grade, the students used blogs to share stories and then they eventually began blogging with other classes. The students learned about online safety, how to respond to posts, and to give meaningful comments/feedback instead of just the generic “I like your post.” Besides the use of blogs, the class also used Skype to connect with other classrooms, and they also used Flickr and created wikis.

            Both of the blogs are similar in the fact that they have the same types of themes: ways students are learning and general topics relating to education. The main audience in both blogs seems to be mostly teachers (prospective, new, or veteran), but also general readers. The blogger of both blogs seem to communicate effectively with the audience because there are many followers who read the posts and leave comments. The comments are always positive, and in several cases, the reader talks about how they want to try to incorporate ideas from the blog in their own classrooms. Reading these comments helped me to see that the ideas/activities that I liked and we are in fact good, and that I should definitely try to incorporate them into my future classroom, just like many other teachers are going to do. 

Greetings!

Hi everyone! Thanks for checking out and hopefully reading my blog. The purpose of this blog is to capture and record my journey from a student to an elementary school teacher. I hope you enjoy "My Road to Teaching!"